My New Blog Design!!
For 2 months now I have been working behind the scenes (all by myself I'll have you know) to give my blog home a redesign. Kind of like moving the furniture around or painting a room, adding some new drapes or pictures to the walls, I needed a pick-me-up. I wanted the new design to look fresh and more simplistic, and I wanted it to have a few new features too, like an Accordian sidebar navigation, and a more decorative (simplistic and easy to read) footer to each post. I played around with images in Photoshop and created a new Masthead as well. I hope you will like my new design!
A lot of things are changing, including the kind of content in my blog home. For instance, with all my little ones now going to public school, with the exception of my son, whom I still homeschool until he starts high school, I won't be writing for my School Days Section anymore. And, since my Big Bear has been out of work for over 2 years now, God only knows when we'll be able to work on those things around our home that need attention - like landscaping, a new deck, a kitchen overhaul, new flooring, and new bathrooms! So, until remodeling the house becomes a priority again, I'm also putting the Home & Garden Section on the back burner.
My life right now is mostly about being creative, and talking about my life in other ways - like my children and grandchildren, and how very proud I am of all of them. My personal stories are still very much a part of Raisin Toast and you'll still find them in "My Opus," because, well, this is my opus in so many ways.
Only 1 section has been launched as of this post - the "In the Studio" section, now called simply "Atelier" for "Studio." I wanted this to be the first section launched with the new design because Raisin Toast is being featured all this week on the site "WeAllSew.com" which is sponsored by Bernina! How exciting! I am having a sew-a-long all week and I hope you will join me in making a beautiful quilted table runner for the upcoming Christmas holidays. I probably should have started with a Thanksgiving table runner, but when I saw this pattern in my favorite quilt shop, I snapped it up. But, table runners are easy to make and I am sure that if you find a quilted table runner with a Thanksgiving theme, you can still follow along with me all week.
Bear with me while I make changes to Raisin Toast over the coming couple of weeks. I'll be putting the finishing touches on the design and launching each section little by little. I now know why web designers charge thousands to design blogs and websites! Goodness, this has been exhausting. Even the little elements take so much time to create and then code into the template. My brain is fried. I don't know how anyone does this for a living without losing their eyesight. I've been looking at so much HTML, CSS, and JQuery, and Javascript, even my dreams are about coding. I just hope I'm not sick of the new design by the time I launch the dang thing!
The good news is that - yes - I've become quite the TypePad Advanced Template Design Pro (A TypePad Champion if you ask the folks at SixApart), and I am here to help anyone who has a TypePad blog with designing Mastheads, icons, Horizontal Navigation, footers, and more. As exhausting as it has been, I think that is mostly because I also had to learn how to add the fancier navigation and sidebar utilities that I wanted over the course of the last few months. Now that I know how it all works, it is all coming together a lot easier.
So there you go - I'm off to a good start. I think. If you happen to run across any problems on my site or with my design, PLEASE let me know!!! Like - I cannot figure out why the sharing buttons below are vertical and not horizontal. If you know how to fix this let me know. I've spent the last hour messing with it and I finally called it a night.
With that, I'm ready to start this table runner!
